Involving people without a computer

[Peter Schlesinger <pschles@starband.net>]

The citizens of our EPA review team have lacked appropriate Internet connections to be able to receive the multitude of documents that arrive by by email. Most of these are 3-4MB in size and don't download well on 28K modem access speeds. MMR citizen team members pay for their own Internet access. Documents also arrive from EPA and other stakeholders by courier, but they are not timely. If I didn't have satellite Internet access, it would be a week to 10 days before I could receive each weekly report. Many documents discussed at our monthly meetings don't arrive in sufficient time to allow any review, let alone adequate review. EPA and other stakeholder documents need to arrive promptly, be given adequate time for review, and each should accompanied by a note indicating to whom comments should be made and by when, and when there are a lot of them, in what order of priority. I realize this is difficult to deal with especially when regulatory deadlines need to be met, decisions need to be made, and many times EPA makes them on their own with little public review. Only fairly recently have we learned that EPA has been holding technical meetings with stake holders at which many decisions are made without any public involvement. Citizens and public need to be made aware of and invited to technical meetings; our TOSC technical assistance advisors have advised us that we ought to be at those meetings, but they are held during the work day, making it difficult to be present or be able to put in the extra time required. One of our team members, who recently passed away, had no computer. It was difficult to contact him and keep him abreast of what we were trying to do; still he got the documents by mail, attended all the meetings, and was an avid, contributing member of the Team. 

    When I started working on our Team, I had a computer but had insufficient Internet access. EPA made available most of the minutes and some of the documents (plus I borrowed some from other citizens to read); luckily I had fast Internet access at work and could download those available as PDFs on to Zip disks to take them home or print them out to review, to get up to date, to begin to understand the terms, and begin to offer appropriate comment other than what does that mean. EPA staff didn't have all of the documents available for me, and I had to spend some of my days off and other personal time reviewing them in a stakeholder's archive. My local town library and other adjoining town's libraries had been receiving the documents, but no one was storing them appropriately. In my town, these documents were and still are in total disarray, now filed in a locked closet in the library basement. Citizens have to know they are there and what they want to gain access to them. EPA or some agency should make funding available to libraries to organize documents for public access, and offer training to librarians and other public information management staff to better involve the public.